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The Mailer Review

Norman Mailer is said to be very ill and in the hospital, and we hope he pulls through.

For anyone who’s interested, a fascinating testament to Mailer’s headlong life has has arrived on newsstands – the inaugural issue of The Mailer Review, a product of the University of South Florida and the Norman Mailer Society. The journal’s editor, Phillip Sipiora, has deftly searched the Mailer archives (at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, among other places) and rounded up a lot of first-rate material. There’s nary a dull page among its 265.

What’s here? There’s a smart, Mailer-related self-interview by William Kennedy; an excerpt from an uncompleted authorized biography of Mailer; a chunk of an unpublished play from 1942; a long interview with Lawrence Schiller, who collaborated with Mailer on “The Executioner’s Song” (Schiller tells the interviewer that he’d originally hoped that Joan Didion would write the book with him); and letters to William Styron and to and from Don DeLillo, among others.

(Didion reviewed “The Executioner’s Song” in the Book Review when it appeared in 1979; that is here. Ignore the 1996 date you will see on this.)

Here’s a bit of a May 1995 letter to Mailer, printed in the magazine, from Don DeLillo, after Mailer had sent him “Oswald’s Ghost”:

I don’t think Oswald would have walked a block and a half to shoot at Kennedy. The President had to come to him. As to whether there was a second shooter, the force of history right now seems to tend against, but that will change, and then will change again.

We’re all stuck with this guy, you and I more than most, and when I look at the cover photo of the Neely Street house I feel an eerie and complex nostalgia for the time when I was following Lee’s ghost in Dallas, Fort Worth and New Orleans.

Here is part of Mailer’s reply:

… by God, hang around with the KGB long enough and you do get some inkling of how their minds operate … As for the second shooter, let’s discuss that too. My mind is not closed on that either although, as you can see, I lean to Oswald alone.

Norman Mailer, ca. 1957

The Mailer Review also includes ephemera like the photo here, taken in the late 50s, when Mailer briefly wore a hipster/beatnik goatee.

Some several topics back I remarked that Joyce Carol Oates must be the most overrated writer of our time. Not so — I’d forgotten Mailer. My sympathies to the man on his bed of pain, however, of course. (Hipster/beatnik? I thought he looked more rabbinical.) I can’t say Executioner’s Song is his best book; it is, however, one of only two I finished, and I finished Naked and the Dead only because it was assigned reading for a college course.

More than anything Mailer represented the emotional damage the men of his generation brought home from WWII.

Their unexamined suffering explains our society’s disintegration in the 1960s when their children entering adolescence acted out the hidden turbulence of their fathers and unhappy mothers caring for these troubled men.

The psychological fallout from war ultimate led to the collapse in conventional sexuality identity and stable, middle class family life.

The Mailer Review will be welcome as it introduces a closer examination of scores of themes and subtexts in the writers that have only been faintly attended to, or not at all. Mailer is nineteenth century Romantic with a genre-bending postmodernist writing strategy and a genuine religious existentialism. None of these themes play peacefully together, and it’s a testament to his experiments with narrative form that he’s often times wrestled them into a vivid coherence. My thanks to Philip Sipiora for his hard work.

Anyone who could call Norman Mailer overrated either lacks the capacity to understand his sentences or the wherewithal to try. Certainly those of us who have ventured forth with an open and curious mind have not regretted the journey. Get well soon, Norman.